Office 365 License Management is the management of enterprise users’ software usage within their organization. M365 license management focuses on reducing, documenting, and controlling total IT costs. In short, the goal is to help you monitor and maintain all your organization’s various users. Specifically, identifying how many and which type of licenses, by which employees.

Furthermore, core to license lifecycle management is understanding the complete state of your M365 licenses and their usage. Proper license lifecycle management means that all users are equipped with the right level of functionality, and new licenses are brought in when they are needed – and at the right size and level.

The essence of a data-driven M365 license lifecycle management approach, and being on top of it will help you truly maximize your Microsoft investment and gain optimum ROI.

Why Office 365 License Management Matters

With 40% of Office Microsoft 365 licenses under used (which roughly equals 30% of your Office M365 subscription value) – it is important to ensure your licenses are put to good use.

Below we break down the risks of poor license management.

Shadow IT

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Shadow IT Issues:

• License Compliance Violations – Freemium or shared accounts can put your approved SaaS contracts in jeopardy.
• Cost Overruns Out of Control – With Shadow IT, your end users are often paying for applications already served by corporate standard SaaS solutions, wasting money through vast redundancies. Shadow IT gets in the way of good IT software negotiations and proper, efficient provisioning.
• Misallocated Costs – Finance and accounting need accuracy, knowing what software is acquired, billed for, and renewed to optimize investment.
• Missed Financial Goals or Targets – If procurement misses savings goals due to unforeseen expenses from Shadow IT, it may lead to unintended cost-cutting measures.

Wasted Resources

Having a centralized view on your tech stack can not only fuel enterprise-level discounts but can also reduce redundancy company wide. Without having a full grasp of how your employees are using these tools you are often throwing away your software budget.

By proactively keeping an eye on of upcoming renewals and usage reports you can better support your organization and your department.

Compliance Risks

Your Microsoft 365 environment is one of your biggest IT investments - and it's where your most important organizational data lives. Isn't it critical to know exactly what's going on?

Through our own internal research – sourced from 5 million users of OM365 – it was reported that 80% of breaches involve privilege credentials and 85% of cyberattacks enter through misinformation.

CoreView helps you get Microsoft 365 under control by providing automated monitoring, advanced auditing, and Office 365 incident response capabilities you won't find in the native admin tools:

1. Monitor Microsoft 365 and alert if something unusual occurs
2. Audit activity and file access, quickly identifying what happened if there's a problem
3. Prevent future security threats by automating resolution

The User View

Users who get license lifecycle management, and adopt the right solution, reap immediate rewards. “We could see we were not allocating licenses correctly, not provisioning accounts correctly, and then we found ourselves asking ‘what are all these other accounts doing here?’ It was hard to get to that data from within the native O365 Admin Center. It was much easier to get to that data view in CoreView,” said Tobin M. Cataldo, Executive Director, Jefferson County Library Cooperative, Inc., Birmingham, Alabama.

That deep license visibility drives long term license allocation and optimization. “We can hand our offices, effectively, a spreadsheet that shows their current consumption, and ask them to put a yes or no as to whether we need to decrease or increase licenses. CoreView is a very handy tool showing offices what they have today, what they can drop, or what they are committing to for the next 12 months,” argued Stephen Chris, COO for Baker Tilly Canada Cooperative.

Key Takeaways

Microsoft Management Platforms are made to make your life simpler. Solving your license management problems and ensuring the right people are tracking usage behavior.

With the help of tools like CoreView, you can better optimize your Microsoft licenses and reduce your stress. Learn how we help with a personalized CoreView demo.